About Hawkins Partners | Nashville Landscape Architects

Every project begins with our zoning and planning summary (ZPS): what the site and regulatory environment permit, what the surrounding community has signaled it will support, and what its topography and context are already asking for. Knowing precisely where the limits sit is what tells us which are worth challenging.

Decades of carrying projects from first sketch through final punch list have taught us the difference between an idea that is ambitious and one that will not survive a hearing or a bid. That judgment is what we bring to every client's vision. We take what an owner wants a place to be, test it against what the site will allow and what it will cost to build, and give it back as something they can commit to.

Entitlements are the widest-variance line on a pro forma, and for a client that has not worked here, the process is difficult to schedule and easy to underestimate.

Hawkins Partners does this work in-house: specific plan applications, bonus height and overall height modifications, coordination with planning staff, and the community and council process from first neighborhood conversation through final approval.

Over the 40+ years of our practice in Nashville, we’ve also been able to help shape the rules we work within. Through design review, stormwater committees, downtown zoning overhauls, and advisory roles on affordable housing policy, our collective entitlements work goes deeper than just reading the codes. This is the kind of knowledge that only comes from living and breathing in Nashville and Middle Tennessee. Developers and design teams from outside Nashville engage us for exactly this.

Every problem in a built landscape is a detail problem. That’s why we are deliberate with teaching our team about the details. Every two weeks we host our in-house program, HPIU, which is aimed at the technical side of the profession. 40 years of solved conditions don’t get absorbed by accident. We also use these times to invite experts to educate us on the latest technologies and processes being implemented across the industry.

Our attention to detail is why contractors laud a Hawkins Partners construction document set as unique in its completeness and attention to detail. And why all staff answering an RFI know why the detail was drawn that way in the first place.

We model in the project team's BIM environment, with a dedicated BIM manager trained in architecture who maintains our standards and coordinates our models against structure, MEP, and architecture. On a podium deck, that means slab openings, curb locations, membrane penetrations, drainage, and soil volumes are resolved against each other before anything is priced.

This process also allows the owner to see the project rendered, iterated, and revised while decisions are still cheap to change, rather than discovering on opening day that what was built is not what they pictured.

Construction Administration is where concepts and ideas are tested. Hawkins Partners staffs the CA process with the people who made the decisions early in the design process. We are on site through construction, writing observation reports, reviewing submittals against the specifications we wrote, and answering RFIs while the crew is still standing there. The firm that drew it is the firm in the field, which is why the idea an owner approved a year prior is what you will see standing in the courtyard on opening day.